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Tag Archives: Server Migration

Background

If you’ve been following my recent ventures at all, you know that not too long ago I decided to move my virtual private server to DigitalOcean. I also decided to run CentOS7 and use Centos Web Panel (CWP) to allow anyone using my VPS to have a nice graphical interface to manage their services. I have not taken time to formally review either of these services, but I did experience some issues with Centos Web Panel. Some of the key issues I had with the product are:

Obfuscated Code. I know that some people like to obfuscate their code in order to make the program uneditable by other parties; however, if I am unable to look at the code of my web-panel to see exactly what it’s doing, I am worried that the web-panel is doing something that it doesn’t want me to see. On top of this, obfuscated code makes it very, very difficult to quickly edit files if I want to make changes.

Support is not good. The CWP forums, which should be a central source of information for all who choose to adopt CWP into their own servers, is riddled with posts describing common issues. Almost all of the threads contain an administrator response prompting the original poster to file a ticket. This creates a forum that is essentially useless since no actual problem solving takes place there. On top of this, when an administrator does take the time to answer a question, the answer is usually not completely answering the question. To be fair, for a free product, support is something that doesn’t need to be offered; however, a community-driven forum is important, and CWP is not running theirs properly.

Things break. More often than not, users will make changes that unintentionally break things, and these breakages are reported as “random occurrances” by the very users who caused them. Maybe I am just a really poor user; however, during my time with CWP, things would definitely seem to randomly break. People on the forums seemed to agree, too, as all issues that I had were also reported by other users. For instance, after a CWP update, all hosts could no longer navigate to their associated “/roundcube” domains to access webmail. The problem was reported on the forums; however, it was left unanswered.

Untemplatable. I don’t only use my VPS to run my web services and applications, I also allow other people to host their websites, services, and applications on my VPS. When they login to their web panel, however, I want them to be reminded that they are using my VPS. Thus, branding the web panel is essential. CWP supported this in no friendly manner. Most web panels have a sort-of template feature, where one is able to define their own template for the web panel to use. However, CWP has no such thing, and even when looking for source images to replace and source files to edit, nothing can be easily found. If something is found, it is obfuscated. Most people would consider this to be a minor issue, however, the default CWP template is slow and unresponsive. The unresponsiveness was probably the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak.

With all of these small issues combined, and with a growing favoritism toward Linode’s VPS services, I decided that it was once again, time to make the transition to a new stack of services. This time, I decided to use Linode’s VPS plan, run CentOS7 with the LAMP stack, and finish it off with the free and open source Sentora web panel.

The Process

Preparing the VPS

Setting up the actual VPS with Linode is quite simple. I went with the Linode 4096 plan (Which is the same price as a Digital Ocean plan with less features) and deployed a CentOS7 image onto it. From there, after the machine is booted, the “Remote Access” tab provides all the necessary information to SSH into the machine and install the necessary software.

Installing Sentora

The Sentora installation process is fairly straightforward and fairly well documented. Setup with a fresh new Linode VPS, all of the requirements regarding a minimally installed machine were already met. However, installing Sentora requires a valid subdomain to be pointing towards the server machine. This subdomain will later be used to access the Sentora web panel.

At the time of installing Sentora, I did not have an extra domain lying around to point to the new machine, and knowing very little about DNS and DNS Records, I eventually discovered that what I needed to do was create a new “A” Record that pointed a subdomain of an already existing domain to the new machine. I edited my DNS Zone file to contain a record that looked as such:

www.panel. 1800 IN A 123.456.789.246

Which mapped the “panel” subdomain to the IP Address (123.456.789.246) of the new machine. After waiting about 15 minutes for this new DNS information to propagate, I was able to ping panel.domain.com and receive responses from the new machine’s IP Address.

Note that at the time, this process was two-fold: Since I was transferring from DigitalOcean, I changed my DNS Zone File on my DigitalOcean host to contain a NS entry that told the DigitalOcean host to “Look for the server that is serving the panel subdomain here”. That entry looked as such:

panel 1800 IN NS 123.456.789.246

Then, now that the DigitalOcean host knew where to look, the “A” record was added to the Linode host, which basically said “The IP Address for the panel subdomain is this”.

And with that, the pre-installation steps of Sentora are complete. The real installation can begin. As per the documentation, this includes downloading and running a Sentora installation script. The installation script is extremely straightforward and asks only about timezone, hostname (the subdomain that was just declared), and IP Address.

Configuring Sentora

I decided that the best user-architecture for my server would be one that treats every domain as an individual user, even the domains that belonged to myself. Although I could have chosen to attach my domains to the admin account, I wanted to create a separation layer that would allow each website to have its own configuration. On top of this, configuring my websites as “clients” of my website hosting would allow me to better support those who are actually clients of my hosting.

Thus, I added two new reseller packages that would take care of this. The BasicUser package was limited to 10 domains, subdomains, MySQL databases, email accounts, etc, but was given unlimited storage and bandwidth. I figured that 10 was more than enough for the clients of my web hosting. I also created the ElevatedUser pacakge, which had unlimited everything. This, of course, would be for my own domains.

Before moving on to actually creating the users, however, I wanted to customize the Sentora panel so that my brand would be reflected across the panel for my clients. I am a fan of the base Sentora theme, so I decided to basically use that theme, but replace all Sentora images with my own logos. This was done in the following steps:

Copy the “Sentora_Default” folder (The base template) to another folder (Your new template) in /etc/sentora/panel/etc/styles

Then, once everything is replaced, the new theme is visible in the Sentora theme manager. Select it and voila!

User Creation and Migration

I created each user’s account using the Sentora admin panel. I would setup a generic username and password for them to use, and before alerting them of their new account information, I would do the following:

Login to the account and create a new domain, which was their domain.

Edit the DNS Records for that domain (The default DNS Records are perfect)

Add a new FTP account (with a generic username and password), set to the root directory for their account.

These three things would allow the user’s information to be transferred from the old server to the new server relatively easily. Transferring users is also a relatively easy process. First, I logged in as the root SFTP account on my old DigitalOcean/CWP configuration and downloaded everyones’ files onto my local machine. This, of course, took some time and allowed me to discover that some of my users were hosting a lot more than I previously thought they were (one user was hosting a 10GB MongoDB Instance). I also was able to go through and delete some of the files that I didn’t think would be used anymore, such as log files, backups from my previous server migration (From HostGator to DigitalOcean), and old files that were not in use anymore.

Once all of the files were downloaded to my local machine, I went ahead and uploaded all of them using the newly created user FTP accounts, being sure to put all of the public_html files into the new public_html directory.

I also logged into phpMyAdmin using the root login credentials. This allowed me to find all MySQL accounts attached to each user. For each user, I logged into the Sentora web panel and created MySQL databases with names matching the old database names. Although this could have been accomplished by simply exporting the tables, exporting the tables would not allow users to see their MySQL databases in their Sentora panel. Thus, creating the database in Sentora would allow the users to see their MySQL databases in the panel. I also created MySQL users for each existing user on the old MySQL servers. Unfortunately, Sentora doesn’t allow users to me named in the same format as my old setup, so I had to change the naming format a bit.

Now that all the databases were created, I could go into the old phpMyAdmin and export all tables using phpMyAdmin’s EXPORT functionality, taking care to make sure that the “CREATE TABLE” statements were included. I saved the .sql files, and then used phpMyAdmin on the new Linode host to import these tables.

WIth all database information transferred succesfully, the final change I made was establishing users’ subdomains. I was able to look through the DNS Zone file on the old DigitalOcean/CWP host and find the subdomains for each user. I then logged into each user’s Sentora panel and created the subdomain using Sentora’s Subdomain functionality. Unfortunately, Sentora’s subdomain functionality only creates a directory for that subdomain, so I also had to edit the DNS Information, adding a CNAME entry for each subdomain that was to be added. The CNAME entry looked like:

subdomain IN CNAME 123.456.789.246

More Database Migration

The most glaring roadbloack with transferring MySQL databases is that there is no way to actually view the password of a user. Although this is a great security feature, it causes problems when migrating servers becasue one is unable to view the passwords of old users to put them into new users.

The solution to this problem that I chose to use utilized mysqldump. When run from the old VPS host, this tool would dump all the important data pertaining to the old MySQL databases, including users and passwords. The full command looked as such:

mysqldump -u root -p mysql > mysql.sql

After typing in the MySQL root user’s password, this creates a mysql.sql file that can be downloaded and then uploaded to the new host, where it can be restored using

This command restores all of the users, their passwords, and their permissions to the server. The only problem with using this command is that, for me at least, it changed some information of important users such as the MySQL Root user, Postfix user, ProFTPd user, and Roundcube user. This was due to the fact that those database users just happened to have the same names as they did on my previous server. So, of course, they were overwritten. Thus, with that being said, the above command also contains a line to keep the root MySQL user password in check.

Luckily, Sentora stores a text file that keeps all of the default MySQL user passwords in /root/passwords.txt. Thus, using this file as reference, I went ahead and updated all of the users passwords accordingly. For example:

After these updates, everything on the system was working properly. However, I will admit that it took me a long time to figure out that importing my mysqldump file actually changed these passwords.

And with that, all MySQL user accounts were restored and working!

Small Adjustments

Now that all the major elements were transferred from the old server to the new server, I sat back and casually navigated to as many parts of the websites as I could. Mostly everything worked. I also followed certain steps to transfer MyBB instances. Those steps can be found here.

Another issue I was having involved a PHP script I had written to get the name of the song that I was currently listening to (via Last.FM) for my blog. For whatever reason, the script was not executing and was simply acting as plain text. After several hours of troubleshooting, I realized that the default Sentora installation disallows PHP’s short tags (So <?php is required instead of <?). This issue was fixed by editing the php.ini file in /etc/php.ini and seting short_open_tag field to “On”.

Finally, since I thought that some of my users would dislike navigating to panel.mydomain.com when they wanted to edit information about theirdomain.com, I created a simple HTML file with a Javascript redirect, called it index.html, and put it in the public_html/panel directory for each of the primary domains being hosted on my server. In this way, theirdomain.com/panel would take them to the right place and not force them to type my domain into the web browser.

The Final Step for users’ websites was for them to direct their domains to the new host. I directed users to use their domain registrar to register nameservers for their domains, ns1.domain.com and ns2.domain.com and have them point to the new host IP Address. Then, they directed their domains to the newly registered nameservers of the same domains. With this, the domains now pointed to the new host and all DNS configuration changes made on the new host would be picked up and reflected in the domain.

The Final Moment

With that, the migration was complete. In order to ensure that everything worked properly, I shut off my DigitalOcean host and went to bed. Thankfully, when I woke up in the morning, all websites still worked and pinging them returned a fancy IPv6 IP Address.

I ended up encountering some issues with SSL, Antivirus, and Malware later on, but I will cover those in a later post.